Teaching Beginning, Middle, & End

One of the biggest gifts we can give our students in Kindergarten, is to help them understand the basic structure of any story before they leave us. Every fiction story is going to have a beginning, middle, and an end! Being able to identify these in stories will help students grow in skills such as plot structure, problem and solution, rising action, character traits, and more in future years!

Because teaching the parts of a story is so critical, I want to share with you all today a few of my favorite strategies for teaching and reinforcing story sequence. Using these tips will help your students begin to see the structure of a story, every time they read!

Using Classic Stories to Reinforce Sequencing

When teaching beginning, middle, and end, I think it’s easiest to begin with classic stories. Students will already be familiar with classic stories such as The Three Little Pigs, or Goldilocks and the Three Bears (just to name a couple). Because our students already know these stories, there is less of a mental hurdle for them to cross. They can comprehend these stories more easily, freeing up their brains to consider how the story begins, how it develops, and how it ends.

After students can easily spot the sequence of the text in familiar stories, you can build on the skill with new texts, and with small group texts that they are unfamiliar with!

Retelling Pictures

A great way to scaffold re-telling is with picture cards. For our kindergarteners, it is a lot of mental work to ask them to listen to a story, remember it, and then re-tell the key details of the story in order without visual prompting. Re-telling picture cards give students those visual cues that they need to remember key details, and place them in order. After ordering picture cards, you can ask students to orally re-tell the story, or even write about it.

Graphic Organizers

Graphic organizers are the next step of complexity for our readers. If students are easily naming the beginning, middle, and end of a story out loud, then have them write about it!

For students who struggle with writing, I recommend allowing them to draw quick pictures of their thinking first. This will get their thoughts moving, and make it easier for the writing to get on the paper!

If you want to try a FREE graphic organizer, you can download one in my TPT Store HERE!

To get your students started with re-telling, using classic stories, check out my Beginning, Middle, and End Bundle! Read more about this bundle in THIS POST.

Happy teaching!